San Francisco, CA – March 14, 2019 – Buoyant, creator of the popular open source
service mesh Linkerd, today announced that GV (formerly Google Ventures) and
existing investors Benchmark and A.Capital have invested
$10 million to further Linkerd’s disruption of industry heavyweights in the service mesh space. This investment will be used to further propel Linkerd’s feature velocity and community growth, and brings the total amount raised by Buoyant to over $24
million.
“Linkerd’s widely-used service mesh is multiplatform, ultrafast, and proven at
scale,” said Dave Munichiello, General Partner at GV. “The project’s focus on
simplicity, speed, and scale has driven rapid adoption among both startups and
large enterprises. We’ve been impressed by Buoyant’s execution to date and are
excited to help as they enter their next phase of growth.”
Linkerd, created in 2016, is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
(CNCF) alongside other popular projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus. Linkerd
provides reliability, security, and observability at the platform layer, and
powers the cloud-native infrastructure of companies around the globe like Chase
Bank, BigCommerce, and HomeAway (Expedia).
“Linkerd is a critical component of our multi-cloud, highly scaled
architecture,” said Mark Tyrrell, Principal Architect at HomeAway. “The Linkerd
service mesh has allowed us to scale microservices and applications to handle
incredibly high volumes of traffic in a way that’s secure against failures of
individual machines, clusters, or even regions.”
Linkerd 2.0, a major rewrite of the project released in September 2018,
dramatically improved performance, resource consumption, and overall simplicity
of the problem. Linkerd 2.2.1, the latest version, was released in February
2019, provides features such as request-level load balancing, retries,
“transparent” TLS encryption, and live monitoring of golden metrics such as
success rate, request throughput, and latency distributions–all without
requiring any code changes.
“Linkerd momentum has never been higher than it is now, in large part because of
users who are frustrated by the complexity and big-vendor nature of other
service mesh projects,” said William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant and one of Linkerd’s
creators. “Our focus with Linkerd is 100 percent on solving real problems and
minimizing complexity, not on pushing a particular cloud provider agenda or
building technology for technology’s sake.”
Last year, Buoyant was selected as a Cool Vendor in Application Architecture,
Infrastructure and Integration by Gartner.
About Buoyant
Buoyant (buoyant.io) builds open source software for mission-critical
applications. Founded in 2015 by senior Twitter infrastructure engineers William
Morgan and Oliver Gould, Buoyant’s mission is to create a world where people can
trust the technology they rely on, by giving everyone the power to build
innovative, reliable, and secure software. Buoyant is based in San Francisco and
is backed by Silicon Valley’s top investors, including A.Capital Ventures,
#Angels, Benchmark, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, GV, SV Angel, Tuesday
Capital, and the Webb Investment Network.
Gartner Disclaimer
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research
publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors
with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications
consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be
construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or
implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of
merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
To learn more about Buoyant, please visit buoyant.io or
follow us on Twitter at @BuoyantIO. For press
inquiries, please contact Kiersten Gaffney
<[email protected]>